Rent Chinatown (1974)

One of Jacks best 3. - Chinatown review by JD

This is truly a great film. The heat is tangible. The direction is interesting and the acting is surreal, except strangely the cameo played by Polanski. In my opinion one of Jack Nicholson's best three films (the others: a few good men and one flew over the cuckoos nest). Faye Dunaway plays an excellent 1940's style heroine. One to watch every few years.

Mystery Thriller - A Masterpiece - Chinatown review by GI

This is one of those very marvellous films that everyone should make sure they see. It's arguably one of the greatest detective/mystery thrillers ever made and has a story that is so well constructed it's near perfect. The screenplay is often used on University film studies courses to example the way to properly write a script. Mostly though this is a period film, set in 1937 Los Angeles but filmed in a realistic European style, that draws you into the plot that twists and turns keeping you forever guessing what is going on but the clues are well placed if you can spot them. Jack Nicholson, in one of his best roles, is Jake Gittes, a successful private detective who specialises in marital affair cases. He is hired by the wife of the chief engineer of the city's water department who suspects her husband is seeing someone else. Jake takes the case but soon finds he is embroiled in a conspiracy involving deceit, corruption and murder. With a superb cast that includes Faye Dunaway and John Huston (in a really subtle yet very menacing performance) and with the enigmatic title, which is a metaphor for corruption as "you can't always tell what's going on", the film restructures the figure of the traditional film detective as its brilliantly reworks the style of the classic film noirs. The setting of the sun drenched LA in the middle of a drought mixed with political corruption makes for a really compelling story and a real masterpiece of modern cinema.

Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway star in excellent mystery thriller - Chinatown review by Philip in Paradiso

The story takes place in Los Angeles, in the 1930s. It centres on a private detective, J J 'Jake' Gittes (Jack Nicholson) and his 2 associates. A woman comes to see him and says she is Evelyn Mulwray. She wants to hire J Gittes so that he may investigate her husband, Hollis Mulwray. She is convinced he is having an affair. H Mulwray is the chief engineer at the Department of Water and Power of the city of Los Angeles. J Gittes soon takes photos of Hollis Mulwray in the company of a young woman who appears to be his mistress; the pictures end up on the front page of a local newspaper, exposing Hollis Mulwray's alleged affair. The story develops from there.

As J Gittes realizes early on, there is far more to the story than a mere extra-marital affair. The private detective finds himself sucked into a dark conspiracy with political and financial ramifications, involving individuals who are both very powerful and highly dangerous, as well as devoid of any scruples. Faye Dunaway, who plays a key character, gives the story a dramatic and emotional quality that it would otherwise not have. The film is undoubtedly a great classic in the tradition of the American neo-noir mystery movie. It is a very good film. The atmosphere of pre-war California is re-created extremely well. The dialogues are outstandingly good and not devoid of humour, enabling the various characters - more particularly Jack Nicholson in the part of the private detective - to hold our attention from start to finish.

Having said all this - and this is a purely personal and subjective comment - I felt that the film was almost too perfect, too slick and too effective. I felt a certain distance from the main characters. J Nicholson, as usual, is cynical and pulls back from getting involved, somehow, which is also job conditioning, on his part, obviously. F Dunaway is remarkably beautiful but there is something very controlled and a bit cold about her, outwardly at any rate, which is also a function of the character she is playing. Finally, there are 2 main intrigues in the movie - one that has to do with power, real estate and money, and the other that has to do with the private lives of the key characters who are under investigation. I was not sure the 2 strands in the story combined that well with each other, somehow. So, a very good film, but not quite the masterpiece I expected, which would rock the viewer emotionally. Still, a must-see.